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against the discrepancies they hold for us. There is fond reminiscence and fickle recall; there is the freight of unsaid grievances and encumbering sorrows; there is stupefied infantilism and the persistence of their power. And more, perhaps, there is our faint speculation as to their indwelling lives: what lusts and frustrations, what cruelties and kindnesses, what dreams avowed, enacted or disavowed. We are puzzle-headed when we think of them. We are always subordinate. The cartoon they make for us can never be adequately drawn. In any case, some elusive dimension attaches to the imagining of lives that existed before we did, and to those, of course, no longer still alive. Telling stories, even in a whisper, carries this insufficiency.
    I believe that in Australia, my father, Nicholas, felt once again heroic. He was a frontiersman, white, filled with colonial aspiration. When he and Stella disembarked in Broome, in the remote north-west, he sensed immediately the promise and seduction of adventure; but his wife, looking backwards, sensed vacancy and desolation. The brassy light enveloped them, stunning in its brightness; there were wondrous highskies and broad horizons, so that Nicholas felt expanded, as if on a mission. Stella, on the other hand, squinted in a rim of shadow beneath her broad linen bonnet, smoothed the front of her stiff poplin skirt, and believed that her life, just begun, had already ended. She developed a tough fury that she would exhibit for the rest of her life, so that it predominated even when she might have found reasons to be happy.
    A trader from the ship drove them in a rattly Ford jalopy from the jetty to town. This was largely an Asian and Aboriginal town, built around the pearling and cattle industries. There were Japanese and Malay pearl divers, Chinese tradesmen, Aboriginal stock-workers, a tiny white community of owners and managers. Corrugated iron shacks lined the red gravel roads, many of them rusted, aslant, looking drunkenly derelict; there were boab trees, mudflats, mangy wandering dogs. Pearling luggers, caught by the receding tide, listed in despondent formations beyond mangrove swamps; the sea was visible, a strip of shine at a muddy distance. In town, small groups of Aboriginal people sat talking in peaceful clusters, or lounged in doorways, or on narrow verandas. It was a slow town, calm. There was a serene equanimity in the way the locals moved, in the hush of their talk, in the gestures of solicitude by which greetings were made and tasks were performed.
    Stella peered from the cabin of the truck and could not understand what she was seeing. So many coloured people. So many foreign faces. For her this was a place of utter barbarity, and she had yet to learn that this was not their final destination. Nicholas had arranged a stay at a cattle station in the scrubland of spinifex and rocky outcrops, twenty miles southwest, so that he might be within scholarly proximity of his chosen Aboriginal tribe. Papers from the Chief Protector of Aborigines – who owned, in a sense, an entire people – instructed Nicholas on a location, and indeed the terms of hisproject. Only later did he guess he was being cast aside, sent where he might be most useless and forgotten.
    They arrived at a modest whitewashed building, wooden-panelled and set on low stilts, called, somewhat grandly, the Continental Hotel. That first night, lying together beneath the high flimsy cone of a mosquito net, Nicholas tried to reason with his wife, but ended up hitting her. Stella instantly quietened. The bed they shared, enclosed against the tropical night and its streams of buzzing life, was sweltering and forlorn. It represented the world made brutal, another entrapment. Stella wept before she performed her wifely duty. Later, sticky with sweat and sexual fluids, aware of the smarting pain that had overtaken her face, she woke in the middle of the night, released herself from the net, and sat alone, on a hard